


Man's Petty Nations

by aurora_ff



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 05:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3557522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_ff/pseuds/aurora_ff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabble prompt by <a href="http://stars-inthe-sky.tumblr.com/">stars-inthe-sky</a> over at tumblr:</p><p>"How can I leave her? / Where would I start? / Let man's petty nations tear themselves apart / My land's only borders lie around my heart"</p><p>['Anthem', Chess (the Musical)]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Man's Petty Nations

It was Steve that was the man clothed in red, white, and blue during the war. Captain America, the shining example of patriotism and freedom; he was the shining star while Sergeant James Barnes worked on the edges and in the shadows to keep both this national symbol and his best friend’s hands and conscience clean. 

It was those Howling Commando missions that came back to James first, the faces and names and the comfort of having a half-dozen highly trained and competent Allied companions at his and Steve’s back. With the English Falsworth and the French Dernier as his brothers, national loyalties dimmed even further in importance to Buck. Good people were good people; and no amount of rhetoric or propaganda from the mouths of gray-haired men could be swallowed for long by Bucky Barnes. That sentiment held even when everything else was stripped from him.

Lines in the sand had always been thin for James, borders and rules and dictates to be challenged; authority be damned.

When Barnes first practiced his rudimentary Russian somewhere in the wilderness of Belarus with Agent Peggy Carter, the word for ‘red’, _krazniy_ and the word for ‘beautiful’, _krazsiviy,_ confused themselves in his head. Months later, the men that recovered him and the men that enslaved him never corrected the little cognitive foible.

So when a crimson-haired Soviet agent is paired with the Winter Soldier on her first mission, her color is thrice as brilliant as anything else, sparking something akin to memory. He remembers he never battled for nations, not truly, but for the very souls that fought shoulder-to-shoulder with him to survive. And now that is only Natalia Romanova. She is Red. She is Beauty. 

They call him ‘the American’. She is born Russian. In the hot tangle of their tongues and limbs as they take their clandestine comfort and assert their souls, the Soldier and the Spy can not tell one another apart. Conquest? Surrender? They leave such things to presidents and dictators. Yet a Cold War melts and makes accords in the melding of flesh-on-flesh. An Iron Curtain means nothing to their organic conjoining. 

He encourages Natalia to defect, again and again, to take something of them both with her before they are caught. Before he is wiped. But she refuses. 

“How can leave you?” she breathes in the hollow of his ear. “That would be desertion.” 

He cannot argue with her. The Soldier smiles, sadly, understanding that the only loyalties he has ever had are those defined by his heart. 


End file.
